Saturday mornings, written down

Halloween, but make it Ethiopian

Someone (Luka) brought a pumpkin. Nobody carved it. It sat at the end of the table all morning like a very patient member, and at noon Jelena took it home for soup, which feels like the right ending.

The theme was three Ethiopians, three processes: a washed Yirgacheffe, a natural Guji and an anaerobic Sidama, all light roasts, all on the V60 at 1:16. We tasted blind, and the funny thing is that everyone could tell which was which by smell alone before the water even went in. The anaerobic Bensa smelled like strawberry jam left in a warm car. Dragan said “party fruit cake” and it is now on the label.

The real moment belonged to Ana. For three years she has been gently sceptical of the word “jasmine” in tasting notes. This morning, cup two, before the reveal, she wrote jasmine? on her card with a question mark and then crossed the question mark out. It was the Dimtu Hills. She received a small round of applause and a slice of cake.

It was also, give or take a fortnight, seven years since Milica pinned that first note to the bookshop board. She refused to make a speech, then made a short one. We clinked mugs.

The water morning

I have been threatening to do this for two years. One coffee (the Mesa de Dota, chosen because it’s sweet and forgiving), one recipe, one grinder setting, four waters: Dorćol tap straight (280 ppm on the meter), tap through a jug filter (190), a half-and-half blend of tap and soft bottled spring water (120), and a low-mineral bottled water on its own (35).

Results, by blind vote of nine: the straight tap came last unanimously, described as “chalky”, “flat” and, by Dragan, “what I drink every day, thank you very much”. The very soft water was second-last — bright but hollow and a little sour. The half-and-half blend won by a mile. The jug filter came a respectable second.

Practical outcome: the club now keeps two big bottles of soft spring water under the table and mixes 1:1 with filtered tap. Total cost about 150 dinars a week. I have made a spreadsheet. Nobody asked for the spreadsheet. It is linked in the group chat anyway.

Plum season and a moka pot confession

Jelena arrived with a crate of požegača plums from her aunt in Šumadija and four jars of something dark and glossy: plum and espresso pekmez, cooked down on Thursday for three hours. We ate it on bread with butter and then, when the bread ran out, off spoons.

The coffee theme was the moka pot, and this is where I must confess. I have been tamping my moka basket for three years. Firmly. With the bottom of a glass. Milica watched me fill the basket, put a hand on my arm, and said “Luka. No.” The untamped version was rounder, sweeter and did not make the pot shriek. Three years.

We also tried the Honduran anaerobic from Plamen & Zrno, which tasted like passion-fruit yoghurt and split the table perfectly in half. Teodora wants a bag of it for her birthday. Milica wants it never to be mentioned again.

Cold brew on the river

Thirty-six degrees by ten o’clock, so for the third summer running we abandoned the bookshop and took the club to the Sava. Three jars of cold brew had been steeping in Milica’s fridge since Thursday evening: a Brazilian, a Rwandan natural and an experimental half-and-half blend that Stefan insisted on.

We set up under the willows on Ada with a cooler bag, a bag of ice, tonic, lemons and a jar of lavender honey for the new cold brew lemonade, which was the hit of the day. A man fishing nearby accepted a cup, said it was “not bad for cold coffee”, and then had two more.

A watermelon, brought by Marko, rolled off the bench and down the bank and had to be rescued from the shallows. It was fine. It was delicious. The blend, by the way, was the best of the three, and Stefan has been quietly unbearable about it ever since.

The Geisha we could barely afford

Nemanja keeps count, and according to his spreadsheet this was our three hundredth meetup. We decided to mark it with something none of us would ever buy alone: one hundred grams of a washed Geisha from Boquete, which cost about as much as the rest of the month’s beans put together. The bean jar has been saving since January.

One hundred grams, eleven people. Nemanja weighed out exactly 9.0 g per brew and we did it in pairs on the V60, 1:17, at 92 °C, with the soft water. The room went quiet in a way it rarely does. Jasmine, bergamot, white peach, and a finish that seemed to go on for a full minute.

To keep us honest, we tasted it blind against the Costa Rican Mesa de Dota. Two people picked the Costa Rican as their favourite, which I think is the healthiest possible outcome. Luka says the moisture in his eyes was from the steam.

Roast #31

I am writing this one because I was late, but also because I would have begged to write it anyway. After two years and thirty roasts on a secondhand popcorn machine, I brought something I was proud of: a washed Burundi from Kayanza, roasted to just over a minute past first crack, rested nine days.

We put it blind against a professional roast of a similar Rwandan. It did not win — the Rwandan was cleaner — but it came second by one vote, and three people wrote “cranberry” on their cards without prompting. Ivana said it tasted like Christmas sauce, which I am choosing to interpret as praise.

The full roast profile is in the roast log. The secret, if there is one: I finally preheated the machine, and I cooled the beans in a colander in front of a fan instead of just leaving them in the chaff bowl to bake.

Snow, and a coffee that tastes of tomato leaves

Twenty centimetres of snow overnight, buses running whenever they felt like it, and still seven of us made it up the stairs by half past nine with wet boots. Milica had the radiator on full and the kettle already going. The first coffee was a Brazilian natural in the French press, poured into whatever mugs we had, drunk standing up at the window.

Then Stefan unveiled his Kenyan. He had roasted the Kiamuri Ridge lot from Nyeri, and it was the first time anyone at the club said “tomato leaf” and meant it as a compliment. Blackcurrant, grapefruit, and that green, savoury, vine smell. I had always thought tasting notes were a bit of a joke. I take it back.

Orthodox Christmas had been on Wednesday, so there were leftover česnica crumbs and a box of vanilice on the table. Nobody went home before one.

The fruitcake coffee

Our Christmas meetup, a few weeks early so that people could still come before they disappear to villages and in-laws. I baked three trays of coffee vanilice on Thursday and hid one of them, so I know exactly how many were eaten: eighty-four.

We drank a black-honey Costa Rican that tasted of raisins, molasses and cinnamon, so exactly like the inside of a fruitcake that Ana checked the bag for added flavourings. (There were none. Just the drying.) Against it, a sparkling washed Colombian from Nariño, which was the opposite in every way — lime and chamomile and cane sugar — and which Nemanja immediately ordered two bags of for his parents.

We did a small gift exchange with a 500-dinar limit. I received a beautiful old brass hand mill from the flea market, which I suspect was Dragan, and which grinds džezva coffee to perfect powder if you have twenty minutes and good forearms.

The first džezva duel

It started, as these things do, with an argument. Teodora, who learned to make domaća kafa from videos, said she preferred to let it rise three times. Dragan, who learned from his mother in 1974, said twice, and that a third rise “boils the soul out of it”. Milica, sensing a theme, declared a duel.

Rules: same coffee (the Três Irmãs, ground to powder at the market on Friday), same copper džezva size, same single gas ring borrowed from the shop downstairs, two cups each, medium sugar. Three judges tasting blind: me, Ivana and Nemanja. Points for foam, body, sweetness and “how much it makes you want to sit down and talk”.

Dragan won, eleven points to nine. His foam was thicker and lasted longer. Teodora’s was sweeter and, I thought privately, smoother. A rematch has been demanded and is scheduled for next autumn. Dragan has started training, by which I mean making coffee exactly as he always has, but looking more serious about it.

An AeroPress in a pannier

Half the club was still away, so it was a small morning: five of us, two coffees, and the windows wide open to the sound of the street sweepers. I cycled in with my AeroPress wrapped in a tea towel as usual, and for once it was the star.

We had a honey-processed Pink Bourbon from Cauca, which on the V60 was nice, if a little shy. In the AeroPress, short and strong and topped up with hot water, it was a completely different coffee: caramel, blood orange, hazelnut, sticky and long. Proof, again, that a coffee can have a favourite brewer.

We also tasted a washed Kenyan from Kirinyaga, all red grape and hibiscus. Stefan stared at it for a long time and then asked where he could buy green Kenyan beans for the popcorn machine. We all knew what that meant: more smoke on his balcony. Only last weekend he had grilled coffee-rubbed vratina for everyone at Bojan’s house. The man has found his calling, and it is smoke.

My first Saturday

I emailed on a Thursday expecting a form to fill in. Milica wrote back: “Come at 9:30. Bring a mug. Don’t worry about knowing anything.” So I did, with a mug that says “World’s okayest teacher” on it, and I was the only new person that morning, which was terrifying for about four minutes.

It turns out new-member Saturdays have a ritual: you get the Colombian first. A washed Huila that tastes like red apple and the dark sugar my grandmother used in cakes. Then the Rwandan, from a station on Lake Kivu, which was brighter and tasted, to me, like redcurrants. I said so, quietly, and Milica wrote it on the board. I felt ridiculously proud.

Nobody once made me feel stupid for not knowing what a bloom was. Dragan explained it with his hands, like describing a loaf rising. I have been back every Saturday since, and I am writing this one because I was, for the first time, late.

Apple strudel, roses and tulips

Women’s Day, and so I came with tulips for every lady at the table, as a gentleman does, and was late because of the tulips, and so I am “writing” this, which means Milica is typing and telling me to slow down.

Two coffees. The first was from Guatemala and Jelena said it tasted like apple strudel, and everybody agreed, and I agree, it was very good, I had three cups. The second was Ethiopian, from a forest, and it tasted of apricots and of the rose ratluk my mother used to keep in a tin on the top shelf. Jelena said the same thing at the same moment. We are both old enough to remember those tins.

I still prefer my coffee from the džezva. But I admit, as I have admitted before and will not admit again, that this filter coffee is not bad. Milica says to write that I said it is wonderful. I did not say that.

The decaf that fooled Dragan

Milica had been planning this for weeks. Four cups, blind: two Peruvians, two Colombians. One of the Colombians was a sugarcane-process decaf. Nobody was told. Particularly not Dragan, who for five years has maintained that decaf is “coffee’s ghost”.

He ranked the decaf second of four. He described it as “chocolate, apple, something sweet like vanilla, a good honest coffee”. When the reveal came he was silent for a full ten seconds, then asked to taste it again, then said “well, it is a good ghost”. He now drinks it in the afternoons and tells everyone it was his idea.

The Peruvian, from an organic cooperative in Cajamarca, was the other quiet success: milk chocolate, walnut, a little mandarin, and very fair value. The bean jar now buys it whenever the jar is feeling light.

Strawberries, chocolate, and Stefan’s first roast

Our first proper cold brew Saturday. Milica set two big jars going on Thursday night with a natural Rwandan, and by Saturday it had become something like chocolate milk without the milk: strawberry, cocoa, a little hibiscus. Over ice with a splash of milk it was the best thing any of us had drunk all week.

Then Stefan, quite nervously, produced a small paper bag. It was his first-ever roast, done in the popcorn machine he bought in February, and he wanted honest feedback. Honest feedback was: flat, a bit papery, tastes like toast with no butter. Nemanja diagnosed “baked” — the roast had stalled. Stefan took notes like a man receiving a medical diagnosis.

He has written it up as roast #1 in the log. I think it took real courage to bring it. We clapped anyway.

A natural Kenyan and a popcorn machine

Grey, damp, the kind of February morning that Belgrade does better than anyone. We had a rare natural-process Kenyan from Embu, which tasted of stewed plums and clove and suited the weather completely. It was much better in the moka pot than as filter, which surprised everyone except Dragan.

The real news came at the end, when Stefan cleared his throat and announced that he had bought a secondhand hot-air popcorn machine for 1,800 dinars and intended to roast coffee in it. Milica went to fetch the fire extinguisher from the hallway, purely to make a point, and set it beside him. It became a running joke and then, later, a genuine safety rule (see the roasting page).

Smoke and earth

A morning for the heavier coffees. An Antigua from Guatemala, grown between volcanoes, with dark chocolate and orange peel and a definite wisp of smoke; and a wet-hulled Sumatran that tasted of pepper, cedar and wet forest floor.

Most of the table found the Sumatran hard going on the V60. Dragan, however, took a sip, nodded slowly, took another, and quietly slid the remaining bag towards his side of the table. The following week he reported that in the džezva it was “the best coffee this club has ever bought”. He may be right. We will never know, because he drank all of it.

I brought my coffee-cardamom cake for the first time that morning. It has been requested at roughly every third meetup since.

Painted eggs and the AeroPress showdown

The Saturday before Easter, so the table was covered in eggs dyed with onion skins — deep red-brown, with leaf prints on some of them, Jelena’s work. We played tucanje, knocking eggs together to see whose cracks first. Luka’s egg was unbeaten. There were accusations of a wooden egg. It was real; he ate it.

The coffee theme was an informal AeroPress competition, inspired by the big championships but with stricter rules: one coffee, any recipe, you must explain it in one sentence. Luka won with an upright, 85 °C, two-minute brew he described as “the lazy one”. It is, more or less, the recipe on our brew guides page today.

A coffee from the beginning of coffee

Third anniversary, more or less. To mark it, we bought a natural from the Haraz mountains in Yemen, where coffee was first cultivated and drunk as a beverage, from terraces that have been farmed for centuries. It is expensive and hard to get, and we passed the bag around like a relic before anyone opened it.

It tasted unlike anything we had tried: raisin, cardamom, pipe tobacco, something dusty and spiced like an old spice shop. Dragan, unprompted, said it reminded him of the coffee his grandfather drank. We made the last of it in the džezva, which felt like closing a circle that started several hundred years and a few thousand kilometres away.

Back at a long table

After two years of meeting on balconies, in a park, on video calls where everyone brewed the same coffee in their own kitchen, and finally around Milica’s kitchen table, which seats five if two of them are friendly, we have a room.

The owner of Knjižara Ugao, the bookshop where Milica pinned the very first note in 2019, offered us the empty room upstairs on Saturday mornings in exchange for “a cup now and then”. It has a long oak table, a sink, two good windows and a radiator that clanks. We carried up the kettle, three grinders and a scale, and Milica made the first V60 in our new home at 9:42.

Eight of us. A Colombian, a Kenyan, and a bag of something from a supermarket that Luka brought as a control. The supermarket coffee came last, but not by as much as we expected, which was a useful lesson in humility.